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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoAssociated PressDisplaced nuns and others who fled Mosul gather in Qaraqosh, Iraq. Christians in Mosul were told they had until Saturday to convert and pay a tax or face death.

BAGHDAD — The head of Iraq’s largest church said yesterday that Islamic State militants who
drove Christians out of Mosul were worse than Mongol leader Genghis Khan and his grandson Hulagu
who ransacked medieval Baghdad.

Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako led a wave of condemnation for the Sunni
Islamists who demanded Christians either convert, submit to their radical rule and pay a religious
levy or face death by the sword.

At the Vatican, Pope Francis decried what he said was the persecution of Christians in the
birthplace of their faith, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the Islamic State’s
actions could constitute a crime against humanity.

Hundreds of Christian families left Mosul ahead of Saturday’s ultimatum, many of them stripped
of their possessions as they fled for safety.

They formed the remnants of a community that once numbered in the tens of thousands and traced
its presence in Mosul to the earliest years of Christianity.

People of other faiths in the once-diverse city, including Shiites, Yazidis and Shabaks, also
have fled from the ultraconservative militants, who have blown up mosques and shrines and seized
property of fleeing minorities.

“The heinous crime of the Islamic State was carried out not just against Christians, but against
humanity,” Sako said at a special church service in eastern Baghdad, where about 200 Muslims joined
Christians in solidarity.

“How in the 21st century could people be forced from their houses just because they are
Christian, or Shiite or Sunni or Yazidi?” he asked. “Christian families have been expelled from
their houses, and their valuables were stolen and … their houses and property expropriated in the
name of the Islamic State.

“This has never happened in Christian or Islamic history. Even Genghis Khan or Hulagu didn’t do
this,” he said. Hulagu Khan led a Mongol army that sacked Baghdad in 1258, killing tens of thousand
of people, destroying a caliphate that lasted nearly 600 years and leaving the city in ruins for
centuries.

Muslims at the service held up leaflets declaring “I am Iraqi, I am Christian,” some writing it
on their shirts.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the treatment of the Christians and what he
described as attacks on churches in Mosul, saying it showed “the extreme criminality and terrorist
nature of this group.”

He said he instructed a government committee set up to support displaced people throughout Iraq
to help the Christians who had been made homeless but did not say when the army might try to win
back control of Mosul.

Iraq’s security forces, which wilted under the weight of last month’s Islamic State-led
offensive, have been reinforced by Shiite militia fighters and are trying to push the Sunni
militants farther south. So far, they have failed to take back significant territory from the
insurgents.

Pope Francis said he was troubled by the Islamic State ultimatum in his weekly public prayers
yesterday. The Chaldeans are Eastern Rite Catholics in communion with Rome.

“I learned with great concern the news that came from the Christian communities in Mosul and
other parts of the Middle East, where they have lived since the birth of Christianity and where
they have made significant contributions to the good of their societies,” he said.

“Today, they are persecuted. Our brothers are persecuted. They’ve been driven away. They must
leave their homes without being able to take anything with them.”

More than 2 million people have already been displaced in Iraq, and the local U.N. mission said
another 400 uprooted families arrived yesterday morning in two cities in northern Iraq’s autonomous
Kurdish enclave.